The conversation about the best games often splits into two camps: what critics score and what players remember. Metacritic’s historical data tells one story, Mpo1221slot with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time holding a 99 and SoulCalibur and Grand Theft Auto IV close behind . OpenCritic, which primarily collects data going back to 2013, places Super Mario Odyssey at the top with a 97, followed by Baldur’s Gate 3 and Breath of the Wild . These aggregates are useful, but they measure a specific kind of quality: technical polish, immediate impact, the consensus of professional opinion at a particular moment. They do not measure endurance, and they certainly do not measure the strange, idiosyncratic affection that players develop for games that were never universally acclaimed.
A Reddit user named IlmeniAVG collected over 900 “greatest games” lists and compiled the data into a master ranking, and the result looked very different from any single outlet’s canon. Super Mario World took the top spot, followed by A Link to the Past, Resident Evil 4, Super Mario 64, and The Witcher 3 . What is striking about this aggregate is how it rewards games that have been played across multiple generations, titles that keep appearing on lists because people keep returning to them rather than because they were revolutionary at the time. Resident Evil 4’s placement is instructive: it is neither the highest-scored game on Metacritic nor the most emotionally ambitious, but it is perhaps the most perfectly designed action game ever made, a title whose influence is visible in everything from Gears of War to The Last of Us. It endures because it is endlessly replayable, not because it was a landmark.
The PlayStation canon has its own version of this tension. GameRant’s reader poll, drawing on nearly 80,000 votes, placed Red Dead Redemption 2 at the top, followed by Skyrim and Elden Ring . Every game on that list is from the 2000s or later except Metal Gear Solid, which suggests that the PlayStation brand’s identity for a large segment of players is bound up with the open-world blockbuster era rather than the platform’s earlier, more experimental years. Yet the Famitsu poll for PlayStation’s 30th anniversary crowned the original Final Fantasy VII, a game from 1997, and placed Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G and Xenogears alongside it. The divergence is not just about taste; it is about which PlayStation people grew up with, and which version of the brand they are nostalgic for.
The PSP sits awkwardly in these conversations because its best games rarely appear on aggregate lists at all. God of War: Chains of Olympus holds a 91 on Metacritic, the highest score for any PSP game, and Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars and Persona 3 Portable follow close behind . These are excellent games, but they are not the ones that PSP owners talk about when they talk about what the platform meant to them. They talk about Patapon’s marching song, about the ad hoc multiplayer sessions of Dissidia, about the strange satisfaction of tilting the world in LocoRoco. Those experiences cannot be captured by a review score, and they are the reason the PSP’s reputation has quietly improved over the years even as its commercial legacy has faded.
What this suggests is that the “best games” conversation is not really about quality at all. It is about memory, and about the specific conditions under which a game becomes part of someone’s life. A game that scores a 95 and is forgotten in a year has less claim to greatness than a game that scored an 80 and is still being discussed two decades later. The aggregate lists and the poll results and the retrospective rankings are all attempts to formalize something that resists formalization: the moment when a game stops being a product and becomes a memory. The best games are the ones that survive that transition, whatever their Metacritic score.